The Bards Orphans

(Reprinted from SOBRANS, April
2003, pages 36)(Text dropped or modified
from the print edition appears in blue.)

Maybe Im crazy. Ive long since learned not
to rule out that possibility when I think I have a bright idea. When I began
to suspect, back in 1986, that the great Bard William
Shakespeare was actually Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, I tried
not to accept the Oxfordian theory too rashly.

Ten years later, when I
was finishing my book Alias Shakespeare, I found an obscure
sonnet cycle, Emaricdulfe (see the January 1998 issue), which seemed to me to bear all the
signs of the Bards authorship. It was published in 1595 under the
initials E.C., Esquire. But if Oxford could write under one
alias, why not another? Still, I waited over a year before committing
myself. I wanted to be good and sure before I took the radical step of
proposing to expand the Bards canon.

Five more years have
passed, and I think its time to advance what is either my brightest
idea or my craziest. I can only sketch the evidence here, but I submit it as
worthy of consideration.

I believe Oxford also
wrote, under various pseudonyms, much of the poetry for which the
Elizabethan Age is remembered.

This wasnt a
conclusion I was predisposed to reach. Just the opposite. I was quite
content with a single important discovery. I didnt want to discover
too much, for fear of sounding like those Baconians who
discovered that Francis Bacon wrote not only the
Shakespeare works, but also the King James Bible and the works of Milton,
Bunyan, and Robert Burton. The Shakespeare authorship question
doesnt need any more absurd exaggerations.

Then again, think
of it this way: if the Baconian theory had panned out, it would
have been a tremendous discovery, what? We should give even
far-fetched ideas a fair chance. Anyway, here goes.

During the 1590s and
beyond, about two dozen sonnet cycles  about a thousand sonnets in
all  were published in England. This has led scholars to speak of an
Elizabethan sonnet craze, whose stellar names include Sir
Philip Sidney, Samuel Daniel, Thomas Watson, and Edmund Spenser, along
with Richard Barnfield, Thomas Lodge, Michael Drayton, Bartholomew
Griffin, Henry Constable, Barnabe Barnes, and others, lesser known or only
vaguely identified, if identified at all.

I studied these sonnets
for a couple of years and was struck by their similarities of style, as well
as by hundreds of recurrent images and turns of phrase. Some were better
than others, but that is also true of the Bards plays at different
stages of his development. All but a few of the sonnets showed technical
proficiency.

Could most of them have
been the work of a single poet? The more I read, the more plausible this
seemed. Still, I resisted the idea, for the reasons Ive mentioned.

It was more than a
matter of style. Many of the supposed poets, whose identities scholars
have seldom doubted, were friends, relatives, acquaintances, and
employees of Oxford! In most cases, even less is known of these men than
of William of Stratford, whose meager biographical record has frustrated
scholars for centuries. Its a striking point that among the few
facts we do know of these poets is their connection to Oxford. One of the
oddest things about Shakespeare is that we have so little
evidence that he had any literary friends in London. Apart from Ben Jonson,
no other writer seems to have met him!

Many of the dedicatees
also belonged to Oxfords circle. One sonnet cycle,
Hecatompathia, was dedicated to Oxford himself; it was
ascribed to Thomas Watson, one of Oxfords secretaries. Another,
Cynthia, supposedly by Richard Barnfield, was dedicated to
Oxfords son-in-law, the Earl of Derby, in 1595  the year
Derby married Oxfords daughter Elizabeth. Wits
Pilgrimage, ascribed to John Davies, was dedicated to the Earl of
Montgomery a few years later, around the time Montgomery married
Oxfords daughter Susan. Several works were also dedicated to
Montgomerys mother, the Countess of Pembroke; others to
the gentlemen of the Inns of Court, especially Grays
Inn, where Oxford had studied law. (These poems were published between
1582 and 1628; the Bards between 1593 and 1634. Two of the
poets speak of writing their sonnets in Italy, where Oxford spent a year as
a young man.)

These might all be
coincidences, but there were other things too, chiefly the wording of the
dedications. In several cases the poet refers to his sonnet cycle as his
first effort, usually in the metaphor of offspring: as his first
fruit, first-born, child,
issue, infants, babe,
maiden verse, orphans, even bastard
orphan. Compare the Bards reference to Venus and
Adonis as the first heir of my invention; the poem
was dedicated in 1593 to the Earl of Southampton, who nearly became
Oxfords son-in-law. Usually the poet disparages his verse as
rude or unpolished (the Bard calls his
unpolished and untutored), though its
anything but. Often the poet professes his gentlemanly reluctance to
publish his verses, but explains that his friends (or some villainous
publisher) have left him no choice in the matter.

Your first impression,
reading these dedications, is of a sort of courtly monotony. They all sound
alike. They use hundreds of the same phrases. They belittle their poetic
children. They apologize for their unworthiness. They grovel
to the dedicatees. Was all this just standard Elizabethan practice? Or
didnt these rhymesters have any sense of dignity?

How odd, too, that so
many able sonneteers, some of them brilliant, should make their debuts in
quick succession  and never reappear! Each makes his debut as
sonneteering Rookie of the Year, as it were, and then never writes another
sonnet! Contrast French sonneteers like Pierre Ronsard, who poured out
reams of sonnet cycles. Whats more, these English boys keep
promising to write something better in the future, just as the Bard
promises some graver labor to follow Venus, but the
promise is never kept.

The casual reader may
dismiss the whole issue with the vague explanation that they all
wrote pretty much alike in those days. But this will hardly do.
Consider some parallel passages from Phillis (1593),
usually ascribed to Thomas Lodge, and from Chloris (1596),
assigned to William Smith. No two poets in any age ever wrote
this much alike:

Phillis:

Long hath my sufferance labord to enforce
One pearl of pity from her pretty eyes,
Whilst I with restless rivers of remorse,
Have bathd the banks where my fair Phillis lies

~ ~ ~
When as she spied the nymph whom I admire,
Combing her locks, of which the yellow gold
Made blush the beauties of her curled wire,
Which heaven itself with wonder might behold,
Then, red with shame, her reverend locks she rent,
And weeping hid the beauty of her face

~ ~ ~
And as nor tyrant sun nor winter weather
May ever change sweet Amaranthus hue,
So she though love and fortune join together,
Will never leave to be both fair and true

~ ~ ~
For you I live, and you I love, but none else.
O then, fair eyes, whose light I live to view,
Or poor forlorn despisd to live alone else

Long hath my sufferance labord to enforce
One pearl of pity from her pretty eyes;
Whilst I, with restless oceans of remorse,
Bedew the banks where my fair Chloris lies

~ ~ ~
There did I see the nymph whom I admire,
Remembering her locks; of which the yellow hue
Made blush the beauties of her curled wire,
Which Jove himself with wonder well might view.
Then red with ire, her tresses she berent;
And weeping hid the beauty of her face

~ ~ ~
But as cold winters storms and nipping frosts
Can never change sweet Amaranthus hue,
So, though my love and life by her are crossd,
My heart shall still be constant firm and true

~ ~ ~
For her I live, and her I love and none else.
O then, fair eyes, look mildly upon me:
Who poor, despisd, forlorn, must live alone else

~ ~ ~
But burst, poor heart: thou hast no better hope,
Since all thy senses have no further scope

~ ~ ~
To penetrate the pith of contemplation ...
Nor move her heart on me to take compassion

Is Smith simply
plagiarizing Lodge? If so, hes doing it awfully blatantly, and
youd expect Lodge to have a thing or two to say about it. Yet there
is no record of any complaint by Lodge. In fact, as far as I can tell, no
scholar has ever noticed these parallels, let alone surmised that
Lodge and Smith were actually the same
poet. I think they were the same poet  Oxford  and that the
latter work was actually a revision of the former.

Over several years, I
found about 3,000 such parallels among these poems. Many of them could
hardly be coincidental. A sonnet from The Tears of Fancy,
published in 1592 by T.W. (often assumed to be Thomas
Watson), is a near twin of the only sonnet published under Oxfords
name. Compare the last of T.W.s 60 sonnets with Oxfords
sonnet:

T.W.:

Who taught thee first to sigh, alas, sweet heart?
Who taught thy tongue to marshal words of plaint?
Who filled thine eyes with tears of bitter smart?
Who gave thee grief and made thy joys so faint?
Who first did paint with colours pale thy face?
Who first did break thy sleeps of quiet rest?
Who forcd thee unto wanton love give place?
Who thralld thy thoughts in fancy so distressd?
Who made thee bide both constant firm and sure?
Who made thee scorn the world and love thy friend?
Who made thy mind with patience pains endure?
Who made thee settle steadfast to the end?
Then love thy choice though love be never gaind,
Still live in love, despair not though disdaind.

Oxford:

Who taught thee first to sigh, alas, my heart?
Who taught thy tongue the woeful words of plaint?
Who filled your eyes with tears of bitter smart?
Who gave thee grief and made thy joys to faint?
Who first did paint with colours pale thy face?
Who first did break thy sleeps of quiet rest?
Above the rest in court who gave thee grace?
Who made thee strive in honour to be best?
In constant truth to bide so firm and sure,
To scorn the world regarding but thy friends?
With patient mind each passion to endure,
In one desire to settle to the end?
Love then thy choice wherein such choice thou bind,
As naught but death may ever change thy mind.

In various ways, the evidence kept pointing to Oxford.

I checked out all these
poets in The Dictionary of National Biography and other
sources. Of some of them nothing is known; William Smith
could be anyone named William Smith, or the name could be a blind. The
poets who gave only their initials are of course untraceable. One, the
author of the cycle Zepheria, didnt even give his
initials.

Some were real men.
There was a man named Richard Barnfield, said to have been a friend of
Watson and Drayton, but though a few works were published under his
name in the mid 1590s he doesnt seem to have been a writer. He
published nothing else before his death in 1627.

Samuel Daniel wrote
loads of poetry after the exquisite sonnet cycle Delia, but
none of it was anything like Delia: his major work was a
verse history, so prosaic its almost doggerel. Here I found an
interesting clue: Ben Jonson, who knew practically every writer in London,
said that Daniel was an honest man ... but no poet. He could
hardly have said that if he thought Daniel wrote Delia.

Finally it hit me: What if
all these rookie poets were the same poet? What if all these
dedications were a running inside joke? What if it was Oxford, amusing
his friends? That would explain almost everything.

Another interesting
detail is that most of these sonnet cycles appeared in only one edition,
and there is very little contemporary comment on them. The genre seems
to have been less popular than the scholars have assumed. This suggests
that the sonnets were published at the authors or authors
own expense, not by popular demand. (Could a large reading public be
snared by titles like Parthenophil and
Parthenophe?)

Desperate for at least
some scholarly support for my outlandish theory, I found a little in an
unexpected and utterly respectable source: C.S. Lewiss magisterial
history of English literature in the sixteenth century. Not that Lewis
agrees with me. Not at all. The idea never crosses his mind, and he would
surely have found it outré. But he does name seven poets who remind him
of the Bard in some respect  and all seven are among my suspected
masks of Oxford! He finds Daniels sonnets as lovely as the
Bards; he thinks Barnfield imitates the Bard; he thinks
Watsons conception of the sonnet is much like the
Bards; Barnabe Barnes sounds like a weaker
Shakespeare; and so on.

Sometimes, in the
dedications, the verbal parallels with the Bard are unmistakable: after
apologizing for his rude and unpolished lines, Barnfield
adds: If my ability were better, the signs should be greater; but
being as it is, your honor must take me as I am, not as I should be. But
howsoever it is, yours it is; and I myself am yours; in all humble
service.... Compare the Bards dedication to
Lucrece: What I have to do is yours, being part in all I
have, devoted yours. Were my worth greater my duty would show greater,
meantime, as it is, it is bound to your lordship. Again, Barnfield:
Small is the gift, but great is my good will. The
Bard, in Pericles, writes, Yet my good will is great,
though the gift small. The dedication to Diella
(by R.L., Gentleman, 1596) addresses your ladyship ...
to whom I ever wish long life, lengthened with all honorable happiness.
Your ladyships in all duty, et cetera. Again, compare
Lucrece: your lordship, to whom I wish long life still
lengthened with all happiness. Your lordships in all duty, et
cetera.

The poems themselves
afford hundreds of matches like these: O dear vexation of my
troubled soul (Parthenophil and Parthenophe, Barnes,
1593); The deep vexation of his inward soul
(Lucrece). And Hunting he lovd, nor did he
scorn to love (Diella); Hunting he lovd,
but love he laughd to scorn (Venus).

Still, there are
difficulties. Sidney and Spenser are so renowned that it gives me pause to
include them in my list of Oxfords beards. The short (though
insufficient) answer is that Sidneys supposed writings were
published many years after his death; and Spensers supposed
sonnets, the Amoretti, are markedly different from his other
poems, whose authorship (in most cases) I dont question. I mean to
explore this more fully in another book. (One important link here is the
Countess of Pembroke, to whom Delia is dedicated. In
addition to being Montgomerys mother, she was also
Sidneys sister. Small world.)

All this calls for an
explanation. How could this have happened? I can only guess. But here is
my guess:

Oxford grew up in a
highly literate family. One of his uncles was the great poet Henry Howard,
Earl of Surrey, who introduced the Petrarchan sonnet in English; he was
the first to use the Shakespearean sonnet form (never
dreaming, of course, that one of his nephews would actually
become Shakespeare). Another uncle was Arthur
Golding, a great classical scholar and translator of Ovid. Under these two
influences, Oxford aspired to become Englands Petrarch (through
the sonnet cycle) and also its Ovid (through narrative poems).

For many years
(Im still guessing, but not, I think, unreasonably) Oxford wrote
sonnet cycles and narrative poems, which he circulated among his friends,
but, like a good gentleman, refrained from publishing. Print was still
considered a vulgar medium; no gentleman would write for money or
popularity.

This is the part modern
men find hard to understand. When we write nowadays, its usually
for the very things English gentlemen used to sniff at: money and
popularity. Otherwise, we feel, why bother writing? Very few of us now
write only for a small coterie. (For an illuminating study of how the old
attitude lingered but eventually changed, see Alvin Kernans
Samuel Johnson and the Impact of Print.)

Maybe (still guessing
here, but, I hope, plausibly) Oxford came to realize that if he wanted
literary immortality  and his poems were lavishly praised by those
who saw them  hed better get them into print. Yet it
wouldnt do to put his own name on them. So he borrowed other
mens names, invented fictitious names, or just used initials. By
the time he reached full maturity, he had begun to use the name William
Shakespeare.

When he pulled his old
sonnet cycles and narrative poems out of the drawer and prepared them
for the printer, Oxford added dedications, in which, for the amusement of
insiders, he played the humble novice poet, using a different pseudonym
each time. The fake humility was part of the gag. His friends would get the
joke; the reading public (and later scholars) would be taken in. But if you
read the dedications in succession, you can feel the phantom poet winking
at you.

The hoax worked only too
well. To this day, the pseudonyms and dedications are taken at face value.
It took more than four centuries for someone (ahem!) to crack the code, so
to speak. Meanwhile, a poor country bloke has reaped most of the glory due
to Oxfords works.

This could explain a
great paradox: the Bard says, in his most famous sonnets, that he expects
his poems to be immortal while hoping his own name will be
forgotten. As a rule your name is remembered as long as
your poems are. But if virtually all of Oxfords poems
were pseudonymous, the puzzle is resolved. And as Ive written
elsewhere, Oxford had an additional motive for concealing his authorship:
his own scandalous personal life.

My theory could solve
another puzzle. In 1599 came the small volume The Passionate
Pilgrim, by William Shakespeare; yet scholars have
found that several of its 20 poems had already appeared under the names
of Barnfield, Griffin, and others, so its place in the Bards canon is
now considered marginal. But if Im correct, Oxford may indeed have
written the whole thing under various names.

All this would mean that
we possess hundreds of priceless pages Oxford wrote in his poetic
apprenticeship, before he became Shakespeare. It would
also mean that the entire history of Elizabethan literature must be
overhauled. The Elizabethan sonnet craze, it appears, was
pretty much a one-man show.

If Im right,
Oxford would be surprised, and probably disappointed, that his plays have
lasted better than his poems. But considering all the confusion he has
caused, hed be in a poor position to complain.

Joseph Sobran

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